Sunday, April 29, 2007

Mi Vida con La Manzana, Pt.3: Hell

In January 2001, I moved to deep-frozen Michigan. In my lab and also in a general computer lab at the department, one could find both Macintoshes and Windows PCs. Sadly and somehow not surprisingly, the PCs were constantly occupied and the Macs were usually available, reflecting the general disillusion with the platform. In March 2001, I attended a seminar focused on a new operating system developed by Apple and based on a recently purchased NeXT/OpenSTEP. Looking at the screenshots during the presentation, it struck me that the Mac just got resurrected through the fusion of a visual beauty of the new GUI and the old Mac feel, which is, maybe more importantly, based on a solid UNIX-like kernel technology. Unfortunately, the lack of native applications and missing support for other languages forced me to get a PC laptop - the one-way ticket to Hell. The notebook came with the ill-fated Windows ME and entertained me with Blue Screens of Death for 3 years. In the meantime, I moved to California and started to notice that the ugly and somehow crippled duckling called MacOS X 10.0 started to turn into something usable (Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar) and later even into something solid and very stable (MacOS X 10.3 Panther). Together with the system speed improvements and stability, Adobe and Microsoft delivered crucial applications like Creative Suite and Office, respectively and Apple itself came with a bunch of applications focused on music and video. It was time to "think differently", again.